Adverts by Project Wonderful

Hey, adverts can be pretty annoying, right? I know how it is; I don't like it when I'm browsing a site and I accidentally trigger an awful flash ad where a big, freakish iPhone starts singing at me. That's why here on the Let's Play Archive we'll only ever serve up nice banners that behave properly.

The Archive is a personally-funded hobby, and without donation/advert revenue we won't be able to keep it going. Please, if you enjoy the site, consider adding us to your AdBlock whitelist—it really does make a difference.

Introduction

Known simply as Fire Emblem outside of Japan, FE: Blazing Sword is the seventh game in the series, and was the first one to actually be localized. It serves as a prequel to Fire Emblem: Sword of Seals, which is the game featuring Roy of Smash Bros fame. So no, Marth and Roy are not in this game, before you ask.

This will be a runthrough of Lyn and Eliwood's stories, with a Hector's story playthrough coming later. For reasons that will be evident later, the first run is going is going to be magic heavy, and Hector's will be more physical heavy. The plan is to fight Lloyd first in Four-Fanged Offense and Kenneth in Pale Flower of Darkness, then do Linus and Jerme on Hector's run to show both maps for each chapter.

To those who have never played the game before, the Fire Emblem series is a fairly typical Strategy RPG series with one important distinction, in that death is permanent. There are no Phoenix Downs, no Raise spells, or anything of the sort. If a unit bites the dust, that's it, they're gone forever. This makes a focus on tactics much more important, because if a unit gets in over their head, you have to restart the entire chapter, or go on without them. It's not as unforgiving as it sounds, because there's almost always a similar unit available at some point in the game to replace them if necessary, and the games aren't that hard, but it can (and does) happen.

As for participation, you goons will get some say in party composition and supports when the time comes. I reserve the right to veto anything completely retarded though. But enough about that, on to the game!

And for the love of god, don't spoil shit. It's one thing to talk about something that happens next update in spoiler tags, we'll get there in within a couple of days. It's another to talk about Chapter 31 when we're still in Chapter 3. So no crazy spoilers, even in spoiler tags. Period.

Also, chat about other Fire Emblem games comes up every once in a while. I don't mind idle talk, but if it would need to be spoiler tags in its relevant thread, SPOILER TAG IT HERE.

Hector's Story

Hector's story is essentially the "Director's Cut" mode of FE7. For the most part, we're going to be seeing the same chapters, get the same characters, and we're going to end up in the same place, all things said and done. But Hector's Story does have some relatively major differences from Eliwood's Story. First and foremost, there are 6 chapters that are unique to Hector's Story: two are just added right into the plot, making it longer than Eliwood's Story, two replace chapters that were specific to Eliwood, and there are two more sidequests to embark upon. The chapters that we have already seen are also slightly remixed: the boss might be in a different location, there will be slightly different sets of enemies on the field, or weapons will be switched around. There are also two characters not found in Eliwood's Story (as well as the units we didn't get because of the path we took through the game last time).

Now, we're playing Hector Hard Mode, which adds a few things on top of this. First, the obvious things you'd expect are present - there are more enemies with better stats and better equipment, and you get less experience from enemies. But there are other tricks that HHM has up its sleeve. They reduce the number of units you can bring (in one late game map, this means you can bring a single unit with Hector), add Fog of War to maps that didn't have it, and more things that are basically a "Fuck you" to the player. But some of these are to our advantage as well. Since enemies get these stat boosts, any enemy we recruit will start with much better stats than in Eliwood's story.

You guys have been very good about spoilers (except for a little mishap around Light, you know who you are and what you did), and I'm going to ask that you keep it that way. As usual, anything we haven't seen yet or characters we haven't met need to be tagged. Anything that comes from the main plot, however, can be posted without tags. There's an entire LP on the last 52 or so pages that covers that rather extensively, and if someone is jumping in at page 53 and bitching about getting spoiled, that's their own damn fault. I am going to make one stipulation though.

I do not want any plot discussion about Chapters 19xx or 32x .
Those are the main plot additions to Hector's story, and I want them to remain unspoiled. No discussion, not even in tags. Period. I don't care about mechanics; bitch about how bullshit it is to actually get to the first one, or how much of a pain in the ass it is to finish the second, but if I see a single word about the plot, I'm going to ask you to remove it.

And one more thing. Joining me on this trainwreck ride (mostly to call me out on how terrible I actually am at the game, I assume ) is Fedule, who will be speaking in bold, and starting with Battle Before Dawn, Alkydere shows up for a couple missions (he speaks in underline when it's the three of us). So with that introduction out of the way, let's return to Elibe in Hector's shoes.

Adverts by Project Wonderful

Hey, adverts can be pretty annoying, right? I know how it is; I don't like it when I'm browsing a site and I accidentally trigger an awful flash ad where a big, freakish iPhone starts singing at me. That's why here on the Let's Play Archive we'll only ever serve up nice banners that behave properly.

The Archive is a personally-funded hobby, and without donation/advert revenue we won't be able to keep it going. Please, if you enjoy the site, consider adding us to your AdBlock whitelist—it really does make a difference.